Kim eBook

‘And some day,’ she said, confusedly remembering
O’Hara’s prophecies, ’there will
come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and
the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and’
dropping into English — ‘nine hundred devils.’

‘Ah,’ said Kim, ’I shall remember.
A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse will come, but
first, my father said, will come the two men making
ready the ground for these matters. That is how
my father said they always did; and it is always so
when men work magic.’

If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher
with those papers, he would, of course, have been
taken over by the Provincial Lodge, and sent to the
Masonic Orphanage in the Hills; but what she had heard
of magic she distrusted. Kim, too, held views
of his own. As he reached the years of indiscretion,
he learned to avoid missionaries and white men of
serious aspect who asked who he was, and what he did.
For Kim did nothing with an immense success.
True, he knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore
from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand
in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything
Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life
wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries
and secretaries of charitable societies could not
see the beauty of it. His nickname through the
wards was ‘Little Friend of all the World’;
and very often, being lithe and inconspicuous, he
executed commissions by night on the crowded housetops
for sleek and shiny young men of fashion. It
was intrigue, — of course he knew that much,
as he had known all evil since he could speak, —
but what he loved was the game for its own sake —
the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes,
the crawl up a waterpipe, the sights and sounds of
the women’s world on the flat roofs, and the
headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover
of the hot dark. Then there were holy men, ash-smeared
fakirs by their brick shrines under the trees at the
riverside, with whom he was quite familiar —
greeting them as they returned from begging-tours,
and, when no one was by, eating from the same dish.
The woman who looked after him insisted with tears
that he should wear European clothes — trousers,
a shirt and a battered hat. Kim found it easier
to slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb when engaged
on certain businesses. One of the young men
of fashion — he who was found dead at the bottom
of a well on the night of the earthquake — had
once given him a complete suit of Hindu kit, the costume
of a lowcaste street boy, and Kim stored it in a secret
place under some baulks in Nila Ram’s timber-yard,
beyond the Punjab High Court, where the fragrant deodar
logs lie seasoning after they have driven down the
Ravi. When there was business or frolic afoot,
Kim would use his properties, returning at dawn to
the veranda, all tired out from shouting at the heels
of a marriage procession, or yelling at a Hindu festival.
Sometimes there was food in the house, more often
there was not, and then Kim went out again to eat
with his native friends.